In his mysterious and compelling early work The Invention of Solitude, the American writer and film director Paul Auster gave us a memorable portrait of his elusive father and a startling look into his family's violent past. His later essay, "Hand to Mouth," anthologised in a 1997 book of the same title, offered a harrowing chronicle of the writer's years of poverty and artistic struggle. Unfortunately, enthusiastic readers of these memoirs hoping for more of the same are likely to feel let down by Auster's latest, Winter Journal.

The new book is a rambling, informal collection of memories, musings, and minutiae, presented in the second person and loosely connected by the themes of ageing and the body. It strives to give the impression that is was written extemporaneously, for the author's own pleasure, and never intended to be published. In fact, it feels posthumous, as though discovered among Auster's papers after his death and rushed to publication to coincide with some anniversary or memorial.

But Auster is 65 years old and evidently in fine health, suggesting that his publishers had plenty of time to consider publication. They ought to have mulled it over a bit longer. Winter Journal is a terrible book – the kind of self-indulgent, ill-conceived, and poorly-edited disaster that makes you doubt whether or not you could truly have liked the works that preceded it.

Auster is best known as a novelist, at times a good one. Though he has been criticised, with some justification, for reusing his favourite literary devices from novel to novel, there is genuine appeal in the Austerian oeuvre – he has the ability to imbue the ordinary with an almost supernatural potency. Rooms, secrets, manuscripts, love and loss, the urban landscape – these familiar elements take on deep and unsettling meaning in Auster's most accomplished work.

Here, though, he can't seem to gin up the old magic. He presents us with impressions of his life from early childhood to late middle age, and tries to offset their ordinariness with wide-eyed rhetorical patter, evidently confident that if he claps his hands loudly enough, we'll clap too. In an effort to describe the springtimes of his childhood, he informs us that four-leaf clovers "did indeed exist but were found only rarely and therefore were a cause for much celebration". A robin, he explains, is "the brown, red-breasted bird who would suddenly and unaccountably show up in your backyard one morning, hopping around on the grass and digging for worms". Later, he meditates on the subject of walking: "one foot forward, and then the other foot forward". On public schools: "everyone who lives in the district can go for free." And on death: "We are all going there."

Many of the book's minutiae are arranged into long, static lists. Four pages of the author's favourite childhood foods. Three pages of the schools his wife attended. Two pages of things he has done with his hands. Three pages of all the places he has travelled. Fifty pages describing every house or apartment he has ever lived in. Two pages of scars. Shorter lists abound as well, as in this passage describing the various kinds of girls Auster has found attractive: "some round and some lean, some short and some tall, some bookish and some athletic, some moody and some outgoing, some white and some black and some Asian, nothing on the surface ever mattered to you, it was all about the inner light you would detect in her."

Which brings us to this memoir's least charming quality: an innocent, moist-eyed boastfulness that borders on narcicissm. Auster's praise for things outside himself is nearly indistinguishable from his praise for his own capacity to notice them; he is profoundly moved by the beauty of a dancer's body ("a physical joy that was also of the mind, a mounting joy that spread and continued to spread through every part of you"), the structure of the Brooklyn Bridge ("not once have you failed to admire the architecture"), the weather ("you continue to look at the falling snow with the same awe you felt when you were a boy"). He manages to mention his own handsomeness repeatedly, most notably as an explanation for his pleasant encounters with the whores of Paris ("you suppose you were well treated because you were not an aging man with a protruding belly or a foul-smelling labourer with dirt under his fingernails but an unaggressive, not unpresentable young man of twenty-four"), and he helpfully provides the complete street addresses of the places where his most popular works were written, as though inviting the reader to embark on a self-guided tour.

Indeed, Auster's literary self-mythologisation is epic. He reminds us that he uses a vintage manual typewriter while "bleeding words onto a page", and that he enjoys the pleasures, in his home, of a wonderful book-lined room that he and his wife, ingeniously, "both refer to as the library". He describes himself as "the single self, the lone person […] a silent man cut off from the rest of the world, day after day sitting at his desk for no other purpose than to explore the interior of his own head". His actions remind him of the great writers of the past, including Joyce and Moliére. "Looking at your right hand," he tells himself, "as it grips the black fountain pen you are using to write this journal, you think of Keats looking at his own right hand under similar circumstances."

But Joyce, Moliére and Keats would never have employed the clichéd and imprecise language Auster seems satisfied with here, nor would they have felt the need, as Auster does, to pad one of their books with a 500-word travelogue of the state of Minnesota, or a pointless 10-page précis of an obscure 1950s movie, or three pages of minutes from the board meetings of his co-op apartment in Brooklyn.

Ultimately, it is the co-op notes that illustrate how disappointing Winter Journal is. Deft, witty, self-possessed, they are exuberant little slices of life rendered in gently ironic prose. They are written by Auster's wife, and they're the best thing in the book.

• J Robert Lennon's new novel Familiar will be published by Graywolf in October.